Featured Image Credit: Adene Sanchez/Getty Images/Chesnot/Getty Images
Topics: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Money, Reddit, Social Media
Ella Scott
Topics: Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Money, Reddit, Social Media
Redditors are debating whether or not a man who lost $600 in Bitcoin 14 years ago would have had the foresight to buy-and-hold indefinitely due to the astonishing worth of his wallet now.
Bitcoin (BTC) was officially launched as a virtual currency all the way back in January 2009.
While there isn’t an accurate way to determine how many people own Bitcoin, Chainalysis claims that more than 460 million Bitcoin addresses have been created over the last 15 years while 67 million wallet addresses have a balance of $1 or more, as per BitInfoCharts.
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19 months after Bitcoin launched, a BitcoinTalk user called Stone Man revealed he once bought 9,000 BTC in an exchange.
The man - whose purchase would have been worth $600 at the time - explained on August 10, 2010, that after purchasing the digital currency, he transferred it to his client.
After backing up the wallet file to a flash drive, he sent one BTC to himself and closed the client without any confirmation.
Stone Man then reported that he’d shut down his system and wiped the 'system disk loaded into memory and therefore the ./bitcoin folder' before loading the system back up.
The forum user then claimed after copying his old wallet.dat file some confirmations appeared alongside a confirmation of a 8,900 BTC transaction.
However, the latter transaction was set to an address that he unfortunately did not recognize.
“I read on the forum threads that people have had problems like this but it seemed only when they were trying to double-spend by sending coins to another address and reloading an old wallet file,” he typed.
After being unsuccessful with his search, Stone Man turned to others and asked whether there was ‘anything’ he could do, adding he knew the address where the 8,900 BTC were supposedly sent.
It appears as if Stone Man never got his answer, as in 2020, a social media user uploaded a snapshot of his original message to Reddit with the caption: “10 years ago today, a BitcoinTalk user lost $600 in bitcoin. That bitcoin would now be worth $100 Million.”
In the comments section, the poster also shared a blockchain.com link which is apparently the address Stone Man mistakenly sent his BTC.
The crypto wallet lists that the Bitcoin balance is unfortunately inaccessible, citing the user ‘lost the private key to his wallet’.
According to Google’s Market Summary feature, the Bitcoin Stone Man purchased for $600 in 2010 would now be worth over worth over $808,000,000 at the time of writing.
After realising how much money the user lost, many Redditors rushed to the comments to have their say on the tragic situation.
“I am surprised he did not back up the files,” remarked one. “After all it was worth $600 even at that time. I would play around that much money without ensuring it was backed up.
“Obviously back then Bitcoin was in a beta mode from a wallet perspective. I guess most of the early mined coins are gone. Even Satoshi's wallet(s) is for all purpose gone.”
Another user, who claimed to have read up about Stone Man’s dilemma before, wanted others to understand that this kind of situation is unlikely to happen now.
“Important to know this predates HD wallets and also predates ‘keypools’ (IIRC this example may also have played a role in motivating the introduction of the latter into Bitcoin Core),” they typed.
“So, we're in a pretty good spot today where this kind of issue (having a useless backup) is no longer a realistic problem.”
A third commented: “Someone hosting a pool ripped me off for 77 coins like 6-7 years ago... I still can’t stop thinking about it. Literally haunts me.”
“Let's be real, no one who owned Bitcoin that early would have had the foresight to hold Bitcoin up until ~2017,” said someone else. “Even the most bullish early investors would have probably sold at 100x.”